LIFE LESSONS

New York City Taught Me How to Be a Writer

And a fiction-writing course taught me humility

Actually, back in the 1980s, New York taught me how to do many things: get sober (ish); find a therapist; address my bulimia; ride the A-train; find the best pizza; avoid being mugged — be aware of who’s in front, alongside, and behind you; always look like you know where you’re going; don’t ride the subways after dark; buy a nickel or dime bag of “sens” (short for sensimilla) in Washington Square Park; avoid Central Park at night; and so much more.

But most of all, it taught me how to develop the discipline, energy, patience, willpower, and inspiration to show up at a typewriter (I know, I know), and later, a computer, every day, and, to paraphrase Red Smith, open a vein and bleed.

If you harbored ambitions to craft the perfect, or near-perfect sentence in a technically flawless paragraph, in a coruscatingly clear chapter or short story — and aspired toward real writer status as opposed to merely speaking or thinking about it — chances were that New York would wring it out of you.

It was as if by simply being in the city and soaking up its zeitgeist would give you the tools to write, almost by osmosis.

“On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city’s walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail.” E.B. White

Ed “How My Doing?” Koch was mayor; crime was soaring; crack cocaine was the drug of choice; garbage was collecting; graffiti was seen as vandalism, not street art; Madonna was trending; new clubs such as Pyramid, Danceteria, Area, Mudd Club, and Limelight were springing up everywhere; MTV had just launched, and I became acquainted with the indestructible New York cockroach.

The Odeon, Moondance Diner, Fanelli Cafe, and White Horse Tavern were places to be seen eating and drinking; Aids had not yet been fully understood or identified; cocaine was about to be labeled “Columbian Marching Powder” by Jay McInerney 1984’s Bright Lights Big City, and shoulder pads were every woman’s best friend.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, this pre-gentrified 1980s Manhattan, a blend of millions of souls coexisting in a bubbling stew of ambition, passion, danger, adrenalin, work, love, excitement, creativity, energy, and potential, was to prove a tonic for my soul.

New York removed the superfluous and stressed the imperative. What you did with such gifts was up to you. And if nothing, then you had no right to complain about how hard writing was because you didn’t deserve to be a writer in the first place.

So, I signed up for “Preparation for Fiction Writing” at the New School on 12th St., every Thursday evening for two months. By then, I was embedded in a city I loved with a full-time gig as editor-in-chief of a magazine about creativity, and living in a loft on 26th St. I was also relatively ancient when it came to starting to write fiction. Sylvia Plath, Emily Bronte, and Thomas Chatterton were all dead by 30.

The course was taught by the late Hayes B. Jacobs, a be-suited, authoritarian figure of advancing years, whose myopic eyes peered out through pebble glasses as he lectured us on the myriad rules and regulations involved in taking his class. To back up his orthodoxy, he distributed multiple hand-outs containing 40-plus individual notes on style, as well as umpteen others with titles such as:

“Some questions to ask yourself after you have written a short story” “About this Course” “Some reminders about this course” “Required reading for this course”

Christ, who has time to read all that I thought, eyes doing a roll. He was lucky I was there at all, given my relatively new, elevated position as Very Important Editor in a Very Important Company. Editor in Chief actually meant chief cook and bottle washer, given that there was only two other full-time persons on staff apart from a part-time designer. We were just a wee bit understaffed. But I’d made it my personal mission to make the magazine a success, even if it killed me. And most weekends were spent in the office writing stories, editing copy, reading proofs, or planning the next issue.

Any extra curricula activity, such as reading his handouts, doing the required homework, or researching his background, went by the wayside.

About three weeks into the course, which required writing and submitting a short story or novel excerpt every week, I walked in late one evening to find him eviscerating the work of some poor sod.

“This,” he said, “is an example of what not to do. Despite my detailed revisions and edits and corrections, the writer has chosen to completely ignore all previous comments.”

He held the offending manuscript up for inspection, then went through each page, pillorying every typo, pointing out errors while the class sat and snickered.

“This writer has failed to indent consistently, margins are faulty, cannot spell, does not edit the work, and is just plain careless.”

I sat down at my desk smugly thinking, hmm, glad that wasn’t me. I don’t do that. I was a professional journalist, after all. Most of the others there were probably amateurs when it came to writing.

It was only when he returned our efforts and I noticed the red marks, underlinings, and exclamation points on mine that I realized the poor sod’s prose he’d been excoriating was mine.

I gazed at his red “Margin!” on every page. “Comma here. Periods end sentences,” he wrote. It felt like being back at school and getting a report card with “Ann does not pay attention in class” written on it. Jesus, had I learned nothing? My lack of attention had clearly followed me throughout my life. Mortified, I slunk home.

With my next offering, I took more care, and attached a note explaining that my new job as editor had proved demanding, and that I was already working 90 hours a week, and if I had to edit and perfect each story, I’d never find time to write at all.

Pathetic, right?

When my MS was returned to me the following week, there were the same red pencil marks all over it. And no acknowledgment of the note.

At school, I’d considered grammar, punctuation, and “all that stuff,” boring. My jounalism nickname was “Scoops Coops” because I broke lots of news stories. Editing copy was the copy editor’s job, I pompously thought. (Sigh, those were the days when we even had a copy editor). Moi, I was too busy getting the story.

Plus, I was a hopeless typist: a shocking admission for a supposed journalist. At college in Edinburgh, typing was neither required nor taught. I had refused to learn to type on principle, given that women who did inevitably ended up as secretaries or in a typing pool. Therefore, my copy was often full of typos, misspellings, and missing punctuation.

What monstrous ego and misjudgment I possessed, in retrospect.

Toward the end of Jacobs’ course, I handed in the final revision of a story that I’d been polishing. When he returned it the following week, he’d attached a note, in his usual red pen:

“This revision now appears to be in good shape, and is ready to be put into final form and sent out for publication …IF you follow my corrections this time! (You repeated many of the errors in spelling, punctuation, etc. that I had carefully, painstakingly, corrected in the original.) An example: the misspelling of “bronchitis” on p. 1. Another example: the faulty, inconsistent indentations, such as those on p. 10. And another: your repeated lack of margins at the foot of the page. You’ve preserved your original errors with apostrophes, capitalizations, etc., throughout the manuscript. It is especially disappointing to see this in a writer with obvious talent, for whom improvement and perfection should be steady watchwords.

“I suggest you try the following, and in this order: The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, McCall’s, Redbook, Woman’s Day, Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping.… I hope you will follow carefully the instructions given in class on the preparation of manuscripts being sent out for publication.”

Jacobs, as I learned later, was a respected and revered writer for, appropriately enough, The New Yorker, and passionate about sharing his love of prose. And he spent an inordinate amount of time editing and critiquing the pathetic writing efforts of us ungrateful wretches.

As a belated token of respect, I researched and read many of his exquisitely-written and constructed New Yorker stories—the least I could do for causing him so much grief.

File this under a “Better later than never” tribute to Mr. Jacobs for his patience, for teaching me humility, and of the importance of taking the time to edit and polish one’s own copy.

Thanks for reading!

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